So recently I noticed something quite immersion-breaking in my modded save of skyrim SE. Whenever I walk towards water and begin moving my cursor around, there seems to be this odd fading of reflections in water 10 feet away from me , accompanied by a grey line in the water that moves around with the cursor within the upper half of water in a screen (see first video below). Upon further inspection and moving of RW 2 to the near bottom of my load order, followed by hours of tweaking and searching, I stumbled across two videos that seem to highlight this issue pretty well (that too in vanilla skyrim SE):

This video clearly highlights the smearing and reflective line in the water almost exactly like my modded skyrim, except this is in an unmodded version.

This video (mentioned in the comments of the previous one) attempts to fix this issue alongside a few other reflection bugs, my time researching this issue indicates that this 'fWaterSSRintensity fix' does not work for everyone and really just messes with reflection shaders in the water, reducing the immersive quality of water reflections in order to conceal the bug. Thus it isn't really a perfect fix (I still want those buttery reflections lol).

Both of these videos highlight that there is a high chance that this is a bug with the base game and how it deals with water reflections (thanks Bethesda). So I must ask, does anyone have a experience with this issue and can they recommend any possible fixes for this that still maintain the quality of reflections? Much appreciated in advance.

This thread highlights the same issue (still unsolved). Someone recommends the fWaterSSRintensity fix, but another user counters it using similar reasoning that I used. A fix can't just be eliminating nice reflections entirely right?

From working on RWT and WATER and from what I know, that would be an issue with the engine rendering the reflections. Yeah, Bethesda (or whichever studio did the conversion to SE) borked the reflections up. They are still rolling out a fix here and there with their Creation Club updates so we can only hope they're able to fix it. Until then, ENBSeries v0.324 and newer now includes a fix for tree reflections, but some mods will require an update for this fix to work. The alpha channel of the textures where the cutoff happens (aka background) has to be set to 0 (aka 100% transparent). This will allow ENBSeries to mask the backgrounds when rendering the reflection. Keep in mind this is just for trees, atm.

Thanks @Akatosh, I knew it was something janky w the base game. If you do end up finding a total fix (be it through creation club updates or enbseries) please update this thread. I say this because there is no other thread clearly defining this issue on the internet, yet it seems as though a lot of people are looking for a fix for this bug. tysm :)

From working on RWT and WATER and from what I know, that would be an issue with the engine rendering the reflections. Yeah, Bethesda (or whichever studio did the conversion to SE) borked the reflections up. They are still rolling out a fix here and there with their Creation Club updates so we can only hope they're able to fix it. Until then, ENBSeries v0.324 and newer now includes a fix for tree reflections, but some mods will require an update for this fix to work. The alpha channel of the textures where the cutoff happens (aka background) has to be set to 0 (aka 100% transparent). This will allow ENBSeries to mask the backgrounds when rendering the reflection. Keep in mind this is just for trees, atm.

I am noticing this alongside a few other graphical anomalies such as blue smoke rising from some fires and chimneys or fog that disappears and reappears based on camera movement. Do you think rolling back my GTX 1050 driver would be wise?

I am noticing this alongside a few other graphical anomalies such as blue smoke rising from some fires and chimneys or fog that disappears and reappears based on camera movement. Do you think rolling back my GTX 1050 driver would be wise?

I would start by running BethINI to make sure your INIs are good. Rarely is the cause of problems the graphics driver.